Multinational banks are preparing to pay out billions of dollars in fines to settle charges of foreign exchange manipulation. Some 19 investigations in ten different legal jurisdictions are now winding their way to completion and analysts says the final tally may hit $41 billion.

The first set of settlements are likely to emerge in November in response to an investigation by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK, which has notified six banks that it wants to come to an agreement for them to pay out £1.5 billion ($2.5 billion)

“The discussion around a potential U.K. settlement as well as certain U.S. banks taking related provisions in their recent results suggests a kick-start towards overall FX (foreign exchange) litigation settlement,” Kinner Lakhani of Citibank told Bloomberg. (His team came up with the estimate of $41 billion in a research report published last week)

Some 30 traders at these banks have been suspended to date over the last year, although some have since been allowed to return to work. A lawsuit filed earlier this year named a group that took part in an electronic chat room dubbed “The Cartel” – one of many where traders would collude on fixing prices to increase profits. (Other chat rooms had names like “The Bandits’ Club,” “One Team, One Dream” and “The Mafia.”)

Recently the regulators have gone into overdrive. Some 19 different probes are being conducted by a slew of agencies from around the world including the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, the European Commission, Bafin in Germany, Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Japan Financial Services Agency, the Commerce Commission in New Zealand, the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Finma in Switzerland, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Department of Justice in the U.S.

The banks have already started to warn their shareholders of the size of the fines. In mid-October, JP MorganChase was effectively the first to announce that it was going to need to spend as much as $1 billion in legal costs over the next year, much of which is expected to stem from the foreign exchange scandal. (In July, UBS of Switzerland set aside $2.08 billion for future legal costs, although those provisions were related to a much wider variety of investigations.)

That scandal involved LIBOR – or the London Inter Bank Offer Rate – a global system of interest rates for $360 trillion in international deposits. The rates are set by the British Bankers Association which makes a considered average of rates reported to them verbally by participating bankers. Such “LIBOR” rates exist for as many as 150 different kinds of loans - mostly for overnight transfers between banks although they ultimately also affect the price of consumer loans like mortgages, car loans and credit card loans.